I'm a Time Lord, you're a big fish - think of the children!

[jencat]

Ohhhh, I didn't realise Toby 'Being Human' Whithouse wrote this week's ep until Confidential kicked off... what a nice surprise, lol!

To be fair, I've still only really seen about three-quarters of the bloody thing (mostly via subtitles!) due to my sister et al rocking up within three minutes of it starting, but, y'know, enough.  Any excuse for a re-watch, obv :o)

From what I caught of the beginning..

well, how can you beat the Doc popping out of Rory's stag party cake (having apparently popped out of several wrong cakes beforehand??), burbling something about there being a diabetic girl in a bikini freezing outside, and could someone lend her a jumper...?

Leaving aside the necessary (well, we had to drag Rory into it at some point; it couldn't go on being all Doc'n'Amy for the whole series - especially after last week!), it was all rather fabulous.  There was all the gaudy finery you could hope for in 16th century Venice (those dresses! that jewelry!), Helen McCrory guest-starring as yet another older woman throwing herself at Matt, fake!vamps with strangely familiar teeth (borrowed straight from that big ugly fish with a lamp on its head in Finding Nemo, and still a little bit like Prisoner Zero, surely?), and the plot kept up with the quality of the dialogues this time, unlike the last non-Moffatt ep this year.  Ok, the finale got a little bit silly, but seriously, how else were you going to get out of the whole giant alien piranha breeding-programme dilemma?

One thing I wasn't loving so much was.. well, Amy.  And I really wanted to, but these 'let's drag the other half along' eps never really do said couples any favours in Who.  Honestly, did either Rose or Mickey come out of 'Girl in the Fireplace' particularly well? Everyone gets bitchy and rather daft, and we're not exactly invested in Rory yet.  He is, as Amy so blithely put it, a bit of a numpty (although, in his defence, he was quite prepared to cover for her if she left him again to go with the Doc).  It was all rather cosy at the end with the whole 'My boys!' thing, but honestly, it's all going to end in tears.  We hope.  Cosy does not for good drama make, and besides, DW always ends in tears for all concerned.

She was particularly annoying me in Rory's big fight scene with vampire boy... All set up so they're bonding again by the end I guess, but seriously - why the hell was she just standing there the whole bloody time? This was not the girl we've seen for the past few eps.... honestly, fish dude is otherwise occupied and they're standing in an alleyway filled with stuff she could have bashed him over the head with when he wasn't looking - not to mention the hanging washing that Rory ended up using.. It just didn't make any sense! Not Amy's finest hour methinks.  And the Doc was humouring Rory a hell of a lot about Amy - although, as we know, he's not unaware that hanging around the Tardis is not good for your long-term health, and he's trying to spare her as early as possible, probably...? But yelling at her was overly harsh (and just not as ridiculously amusing as the hands-over-mouths scene later - seriously, when he just looks at Rory that way, and he automatically puts his hands up over Gino's mouth.. genius).

There were some geniunely lovely moments in this - dozens of killer one-liners ("Not vampires - Fish from space!" )  , Helen McCrory overacting wonderfully in giant alien fish/grande dame mode, Francesco being played by Gilbert from Being Human (we had to one have of them in there somwhere!), every single scene between the Doc and Rosanna was just spine-tinglingly perfect - in fact, nigh on every scene Matt had was pretty damn fantastic.  Gurning in the mirror before the vamps arrived was a classic...
Once you see the Francesco Costa documentary on Venice that BBC4 showed afterwards, it also became very obvious that Toby Whithouse had quite possibly watched said documentary before writing the ep - the whole of Confidential was him and Matt having a nice guided tour of Venice with the very same Francesco, who very politely didn't comment on the fact they'd named one of the villains after him, lol!
Also loved the scene at the end where Rosanna strips off before jumping in, except it makes precisely no sense - they kept telling us her human form was just an illusion, so they were, er, non-existent clothes she was taking off?

Best of all, though, was the arc stretching through the whle series - there were those damn cracks in the universe driving the plot again, and the silence and the end of all things.. and then the silence cropped up again just before they left, which felt a teensy bit shoe-horned in, perhaps? And what does that mean, that the silence was there, in Venice in that time?